As required in the course syllabus, students will write posts for the course site about an outside (non-required) source related to the course topics and themes. This section will offer some guidelines for formatting and citing sources, and future sections will have some strategies for clarifying an argument and places to find cool outside sources.
Writing online can be difficult because the boundaries between “traditional” academic writing, journalism, and casual writing (Facebook status, Instagram posts, etc.) have been blurred. Moreover, despite repeated and notorious cases of plagiarism, some people seem to still write with the assumption the internet is not “real” so it’s not necessary to cite or attribute sources.
You most likely have been taught to use a strict set of guidelines for citing a source such as MLA, APA, or Chicago-Turabian styles. These guides create standards for writers that pertain to how to cite something and what it should look like. While individual publications and websites have their own style guides, there aren’t any agreed-upon ways to translate academic citation styles for digital publications (though here is an example of a project addressing this exact problem).
This section is intended to be like a style guide, it contains some guidelines, tips, and directions for citing and formatting a source for weekly blog posts and, more broadly, aim to instill good habits for writing on the internet. It has been written to demonstrate the guidelines as well as provide outside resources for further help. As a result, your posts will give credit where it’s due while increasing your familiarity with publishing text on the web.
Citing Guidelines
Here are the core requirements for citing and formatting posts; you can find directions for adding links to titles and embedding media on the next page. If you’ve already posted to the site, please edit the post so that sources are cited and formatted according to these guidelines:
- Cite sources and turn the title of sources into links.
- Embed media within the post and include a caption.
- Check boxes for the appropriate Categories – at least the “Student Posts” category!
- Add tags to your post to organize the site content. Suggested tags: your first name/last name, the names of any authors/artists/etc., publication or website (NYT, Youtube, Twitter); at least 2 tags describing the subject of your post, e.g., “real estate,” “Coney Island,” “public housing,” etc.
- Each post includes a “Featured Image” sized 250 pixels in width (max).
Next page: putting the guidelines into action.
